Nvidia could reportedly backstop $250B loan for new OpenAI data center campus
SiliconANGLE Maria Deutscher ● Covered by 3 sources
Nvidia may guarantee a $250B loan so OpenAI can build a huge Ohio data center. Add the chips and the real cost could top $500B — that's the size of a small country's GDP.
Nvidia is reportedly in talks to backstop a $250 billion loan tied to a new OpenAI data center campus in Ohio, according to the Wall Street Journal. CNBC puts the site's capacity at 10 gigawatts, roughly the electricity draw of eight million homes, which tells you this isn't a single building — it's a small city of servers being developed by SB Energy, a SoftBank unit that already builds solar and battery infrastructure alongside racks of GPUs.
Here's the catch: that $250 billion figure only covers OpenAI's lease and construction costs. It doesn't touch the actual chips. Throw in the graphics processors and the price tag reportedly climbs past $500 billion, which would make this the most expensive AI infrastructure bet placed so far by anyone. For comparison, Meta's Hyperion campus in Louisiana, expected to host up to 11 buildings, will only deliver half of Ohio's planned capacity.
What hardware ends up in those buildings is still unclear, but the timing gives a hint. A 10-gigawatt campus takes years to build, so OpenAI almost certainly won't be running today's Nvidia chips there. More likely candidates are Rubin Ultra, arriving in the second half of 2027 with a claimed 15 exaflops of NVFP4 performance in a 72-accelerator rack — more than four times what current systems manage — or Feynman, Nvidia's 2028 lineup that introduces 3D-stacked chiplets, custom high-bandwidth memory, and racks packing up to 1,152 GPUs using co-packaged optics to cut cabling costs and power draw.
And there's a second thread worth pulling on: Nvidia is separately weighing a deal to finance $350 billion of OpenAI's GPU purchases. If both arrangements land, Nvidia would effectively be bankrolling both the buildings and the silicon inside them, blurring the line between chip vendor and infrastructure financier. SoftBank, meanwhile, has its own reasons to cheer — it's reportedly planning to take SB Energy public later this year at a valuation above $50 billion, and a $250 billion anchor contract from OpenAI would do wonders for that pitch to investors.
My take
Nvidia backstopping the loans for the campus that will eventually buy its own chips is a neat trick if you can pull it off — it guarantees demand while looking like generous financing. Everyone involved gets to call this ambition; a more honest word might be circular. When the company selling the shovels is also underwriting the mine, the risk doesn't disappear, it just gets dressed up nicely for the S-1 filing.
Read more about this at: SiliconANGLE
